Sunday Levity: Monkeying around diplomatic missions

A simian threat to SAARC

New Delhi’s monkeys have a thing for the corridors of power. That they are already in Parliament, the Prime Minister’s Office and Rashtrapati Bhavan is a well-known fact. They are now infiltrating into sovereign territory of India’s neighbours — the Pakistani and Sri Lankan high commissions have already been compromised.

As President Pervez Musharrafâ€™s visit is around the corner, a posse of policemen and intelligence personnel thoroughly searched the Pakistani High Commission, but no intruder was found.

Soon after the Pakistani complaint, it was the Sri Lankans complaining to police that an intruder had tried to break into their high commissionâ€™s premises. Again sleuths searched the premises, but found nothing. Though police is yet to nab the intruders, they believe it could be the monkeys that infest New Delhi. â€œThe monkey menace is a huge problem in the Chanakyapuri area. But there is little that can be done to solve this problem,â€ a police official said. [DT]

The problem is that there are too many monkeys in New Delhi’s diplomatic district. Submitting a written complaint to the New Delhi Municipal Corporation’s monkey trapping squad may help. But the best solution, as India’s central government discovered, is to get bigger monkeys to chase away the smaller ones. Given the elaborate rules of protocol that exist in international diplomacy, chimps armed with diplomatic passports may soon be a regular sight in India’s capital. Wags will retort that they have been there all along.